The email comes in on a Wednesday at 2:14 in the afternoon, between a vendor restock and a customer asking about turmeric dosing.
Ground Level — the podcast. Video and audio. Over a million subscribers. Live taping. They found him through the rosemary video, the one he shot on his phone before the shop opened. Nineteen thousand views for a man with no following and no channel. They're booking six weeks out. Can he do March 14th. They've attached a guest intake form — bio, headshot, topics he's comfortable discussing, social handles, any products to promote. A briefing doc follows: sixty-minute episode, two cameras, conversation format, no teleprompter. They'll send topic areas two weeks before but not the specific questions. They want real answers, not rehearsed ones.
Bogota reads it standing behind the counter. Reads it again. Puts the phone face down and helps the next customer.
That night, after closing, he sits in the back of the shop and stares at the intake form on his phone. Bio. He doesn't have one. Headshot. He has a selfie with bad lighting. Topics you're comfortable discussing. He's comfortable discussing everything across a table and nothing in front of a camera.
He fills out the form in twenty minutes and sends it before he can talk himself out of it. Then he drives home, eats standing up, and lies in bed calculating the distance between who he is in the shop and who he'll need to be on March 14th.
Six weeks. A schedule with no margin. Garden at five. Shop from ten to six. Close, clean, restock, bookkeeping. Home by eight. Every minute he spends preparing for this is a minute stolen from the business or from sleep.
This is where the title lives. The hours don't exist. He has to make them.
He starts the way he starts everything with AI — a typed prompt, before the shop opens, coffee still brewing.
What comes back is a TED talk. Five topics. Suggested anecdotes. Transition phrases. It sounds like a consultant who has never touched soil. He tries three more versions that week — twenty minutes here, fifteen there, stolen from the margins of a day that has none. Each version polished. Each version forgettable. Each version costing him sleep he'll feel at 4:50 the next morning.
Rita finds him in the back on a Thursday night, twenty minutes past closing, phone in hand, reading AI-generated talking points with the expression of a man being slowly poisoned.
"You're still on this?"
"Five versions. All clean. None of them sound like me."
She takes the phone. Reads the prompts. Hands it back.
"You're asking it to write your answers. That's like asking someone to paint your portrait from a description you texted them. Just talk to it. The way you talk to me right now."
She picks up her bag. Then stops at the door.
"And don't use the mic button in the AI. Use your voice recorder app. The mic button cuts you off after a minute. The recorder lets you go for twenty, thirty minutes straight. Record the whole thing, then paste the transcript in. Pro tip."
She leaves. He locks the door. It's 9:40. Garden in seven hours.
He opens the voice recorder. Hits record. Talks for eleven minutes in the empty shop. About his grandmother. About the herbs. About the parking lot. About AI. Everything. Then he pastes the transcript into the AI and types one line:
What comes back is his voice, organized. For the first time, it sounds like him.
Over the next five weeks he builds a practice of stolen moments. Voice dictation in the truck after supply runs. Mock interviews with the AI in the back of the shop after close — it plays the host, he plays himself, and afterward it tells him where he rambled, where he was strongest, where he lost the listener. It tells him his COVID story runs too long. That he comes alive when he talks about the herbs and goes flat when he talks about logistics. That his grandmother's line is his strongest move and he should get there faster.
Each session is fifteen, twenty minutes. Stolen from the margins. He's exhausted in ways he hasn't been since the first months of the storefront. But every session the voice gets cleaner. Not more polished. More him.
Two weeks out, the topic areas arrive from the producer: Origin story. The COVID pivot. AI and small business. The herb science. What's next. No specific questions. Just the terrain.
He's ready. Not because he memorized answers. Because he practiced being himself under pressure until the voice held.
the interview · liveTwo cameras. A ring light he's trying not to look at. The host across a table that's smaller than it looks on screen. A million subscribers about to see a man with face tattoos talk about herbs and AI for an hour.
The red light goes on.
"So — I have to start with the face. Because our audience is going to see you before they hear you. And I think that's actually the whole story."
Bogota laughs. He always laughs when people lead with the tattoos.
"I got the vine pattern at nineteen from a dream I still can't explain. The geometry on the other side I got in a shop in Medellín the first time I went back to Colombia. And the hummingbird behind my ear — my grandmother drew that on a napkin when I was eleven. In Bucaramanga. I carried that napkin for six years before I put it on my skin."
"You came to the States at fourteen. That's young to leave everything behind."
"You don't leave everything behind. You carry it in a different form. The language shifts but the knowledge doesn't. My grandmother's garden didn't stay in Colombia. I brought it with me in the way I understood plants. Took me ten years to get ground under my feet again — literally. I found a community garden plot for twelve dollars a year and that was the restart."
"Tell me about the parking lot. Because that's where everything changes."
"COVID. Everybody locked inside. I knew fifteen people who made things with their hands and had nowhere to sell them. I knew a guy with a parking lot. I made some calls. First Saturday, forty cars drove through. By the fourth Saturday it was a hundred and twenty. People weren't coming for the products. They were coming because they hadn't been anywhere in two months and here was proof the world was still running."
"And now it's a storefront."
"Bogota's. Part local showcase, part consignment, part community spot. Twelve rotating vendors. My herb blends anchor the back wall. Painted the name on the window myself."
"People think it's named after the city."
"I let them."
"I want to go somewhere unexpected. You blend herbs — tinctures, remedies, things rooted in generational knowledge. Your grandmother. Colombian folk medicine. But I watched your rosemary video and you were citing clinical research from Europe. Ayurvedic medicine. West African herbalism. How does a man with no degree in any of this end up synthesizing knowledge from three continents?"
Bogota sits back. This is the question he's been waiting for.
"AI. One night. A Tuesday. I should've been asleep — my days start at five in the garden, so sleep isn't optional, it's infrastructure. But I opened my phone and started telling the AI what I knew about rosemary and turmeric. My grandmother's ratios. The preparation methods. Three generations of knowledge. And what it gave me back rearranged my understanding of what I already knew."
"Rearranged how?"
"It didn't correct me. It extended me. It showed me Ayurvedic protocols that paralleled my grandmother's ratios — different continent, different century, same science. West African herbalism using identical pairings through a completely different lineage. Clinical studies from the last five years validating what my family practiced before anyone put it in a textbook. It connected her garden in Bucaramanga to research from three continents, and I sat at my kitchen table for three hours with the alarm set for 4:50, watching my own knowledge get wider without getting replaced."
"That's the night your customers started noticing something different."
"Yeah. I could draw a line from my grandmother's garden to a study in Berlin to the jar in your hand. People leaned in different. Asked different questions. That's when everybody started telling me to get on YouTube."
"Which you resisted."
"I don't write. I don't script. I talk in circles. In person that works because my hands do half the talking. On camera there's no table between us, there's just the voice, and I didn't trust mine to carry without the rest of me holding it up."
"Here's what I don't understand. You just told me AI expanded your knowledge. You were already using it for your business — descriptions, campaigns, vendor emails. Why couldn't you use it to write a YouTube script?"
Bogota pauses. The host is good. That's the question nobody asks.
"Because I was asking it to write for me instead of write from me. I'd type a prompt — write a five-minute script about herbal tinctures, conversational tone — and what came back sounded like every wellness influencer on the internet. Five versions. All polished. None of them me. I was wasting stolen hours on output that could have been anyone's, and when your days have no margin, wasted hours hurt."
I was asking it to write for me instead of write from me. That was the whole problem.
"So what cracked it open?"
"A woman named Rita. One of my vendors. Candles. Has opinions about everything and is right about most of them. She saw me struggling after close one night and said — I'm quoting her exactly — 'You're asking it to write a script. That's like asking someone to paint your portrait from a description you texted them. Just talk to it.' Then she stopped at the door and gave me the real tip. She said don't use the mic button in the AI — it cuts you off. Use your voice recorder app. Let it run. Twenty, thirty minutes. Then paste the transcript in. That changed everything."
"You talked to it the way you talk to customers."
"Eleven minutes in the empty shop at ten o'clock at night. About my grandmother. About the garden. About why I blend what I blend. About the parking lot during COVID. About the tattoos and what happens when people stay long enough to listen. And when I pasted the transcript in and told the AI to organize my voice without losing it, what came back was not a script. It was me with paragraph breaks."
"The rosemary video came out of that session?"
"Recorded it the next Saturday. Forty-five minutes before the shop opened. Phone propped on a shelf between a jar of chamomile and a stack of invoices. You can hear the door chime at the two-minute mark because a customer walked in early and I waved them off and kept going."
"Nineteen thousand views. No promotion. No history. One comment I keep thinking about: I don't even use herbs and I watched the whole thing."
"That comment. That's the one I think about every day. Because it proved the thing I was afraid wasn't true — that the voice was enough. That what works across the table can work on a screen if you don't bury it under a script."
"I want to ask you something nobody's asked you before. You talked about your grandmother saying the plant doesn't heal you — the plant reminds your body what it already knows. Do you think AI does the same thing to a person?"
Bogota goes quiet. Long enough that the host can hear the room tone. This question wasn't in the topic areas. The AI didn't prep him for it.
"Yeah. I think it does. The knowledge was in me. The voice was in me. The AI didn't add anything. It reminded me what I already had and helped me carry it into rooms I'd never been in." He looks directly at the camera. "This room. Right now. Six weeks of stolen hours to get here. Before the garden. After the shop closed. In my truck with the engine off. Twenty minutes at a time. And every one of those sessions was me practicing being myself out loud until the voice held."
"Last question. Your grandmother. If she could see you right now — this shop, this podcast, this moment. What would she say?"
Bogota doesn't answer right away. He touches the hummingbird behind his ear.
"She'd say I finally stopped carrying the napkin and started wearing it."
The hours you steal are the ones you carve from a life that wasn't built to hold them. Before the garden. After the register closes. In a truck with the windows down and the engine off.
Technique in stolen time only works if you bring the thing that can't be optimized — yourself. The prompts can be efficient. The minutes can be few. But the voice has to be yours or the hours are wasted, and you don't have hours to waste.
The next module has a name for this. It's been waiting.
This is where the intermission ends.
Bogota's story is just beginning.
Continue →You Are the Source
Module 16 · The Creative Companion